I built a dumb little unblocked game site and I need your ideas
It started last Christmas, remember? My 16-year-old cousin was crashing at my place after our family dinner, camped out at my kitchen table picking at the leftover peppermint sugar cookies I forgot to put away, scrolling on his school-issued laptop complaining that every single game site he tries gets blocked. The district’s filter blocks everything that’s not Khan Academy or the textbook website, he said, and we already finished all our work for the week before break, what am I supposed to do during lunch?
I mess around with basic coding as a stupid side hobby, so I offhandedly said I could throw together something quick, right? I spent the next three nights after work cobbling it together, spilled half a mug of oat milk coffee on my keyboard halfway through, and still haven’t fixed the typo in the footer that says “copywrite 2024” instead of copyright. It’s hosted on the cheapest server I could find, domain cost me $11 for the whole year, the ads that run on the side barely make enough to cover that anyway, so I’m not out here trying to get rich or anything. I built it just for him, and then he told a couple friends, they told a couple more, and now I get around 12 thousand hits a month. Wild how that works.
I’ve just been adding whatever old Flash games I could dig up from the drives I’ve had sitting around since I was a teen, right? I’ve got all the Bloons stuff, that weird skateboarding one where you grind down stairs and get yelled at by a cop, the dinosaur jump game everyone played when Chrome was down back in the day. I thought that’d be enough, but lately I’ve been getting more and more emails asking for new stuff, and I realized I’m way out of the loop on what people actually want to play when they’re sneaking games at school or work. So that’s why I’m here asking for actual suggestions, not just the generic “add more games” that I get 10 times a day.
Wait, don’t get me wrong, I get it. If you’re sitting in study hall with 25 minutes to kill, you just want something fun, you don’t want to write a whole essay. But “add more games” doesn’t help me. Last week I got three separate emails that just said that, so I added five random car racing games I found in an archive, and then got an email back from someone saying “these all suck, why don’t you have any good games.” Like, what do you want me to do here? I’m not a mind reader.
I’ll give you an example of a good suggestion, actually. A month back, I got an email from a freshman that said “can you add that penguin racing game where you slide down the ice and bump other people off? I played it at my cousin’s house three years ago and I haven’t found it anywhere unblocked, everyone only has the new garbage version with microtransactions.” I spent an hour digging through old Flash archives that are scattered across the internet, even asked a guy on a retro gaming Reddit I lurk, and found the original 2008 version. Uploaded it, and a week later got another email from him saying he beat his best friend’s high score during lunch and bought a pack of gum to celebrate. That was the coolest thing I’d gotten all month, way better than any ad revenue I could ever make.
The other thing I’ll get is people asking for big games, and I have to break the bad news. Last week I got four emails asking for unblocked Fortnite. Come on, guys. I’m running this site out of a $3 a month server. I can’t host a whole 20 gig battle royale game that’s owned by Epic. I’d get sued into the stone age before it even went live. I can’t add that new popular mobile game everyone’s playing either, for the same reason. I can only host small, old, mostly abandoned stuff that’s not gonna get me in trouble. Don’t get mad at me when I say no, I’m just one guy doing this in my free time after I finish my actual day job doing data entry for a plumbing supply company. I’m not Google.
I’ve also been surprised by the stuff people actually ask for. I thought everyone would want the fancy new stuff, but half the suggestions I get are for old games that got taken down when Flash shut down for good. A lot of people just want the stuff they played when they were little, that they can’t find anywhere else. I added solitaire a couple weeks ago, just on a lark because someone suggested it, and it’s already one of the top five most played games on the whole site. Turns out a lot of the upperclassmen and even the teacher’s aides who have free periods just play solitaire to zone out. I never would’ve thought of that on my own.
I’m also open to suggestions for stuff that’s not even games, kind of? Last week someone suggested I add a simple unblocked calculator that can do fractions, because the school’s filter blocks the good calculator sites for some reason. I added that too, and it gets used a hundred times a day. Wild. So if you’ve got something like that, that’s useful or boring or weird, just send it over.
I’ll be honest, this whole thing is still really janky. The search bar only works half the time, I haven’t sorted the categories right in a year, there’s a broken link to a maze game that I keep meaning to fix and forget every single week. If you’ve got suggestions for that stuff too, I’m listening. I’m not gonna turn this into some big fancy site, I don’t have the time or the money for that, but I can fix small stuff if people tell me it’s broken.
Anyway, if you’re reading this, you’ve probably ended up on my site at some point, killing time when you’re supposed to be working or studying. If you’ve ever sat there scrolling through the same 80-something games I have up and thought “man, why don’t they have that one game I want?” just shoot me a message, the suggestion box is right on the homepage. Be as specific as you can, tell me what it’s called, what you do in it if you can’t remember the name. I can’t promise I’ll add every single one, like I said, no big studio games, I can’t do that. But I’ll dig around, and if I can find it, I’ll put it up. I don’t even need anything in return. Just don’t ask me for Fortnite again, okay? I already got enough of those this week.
Now I gotta go, my pasta’s boiling over on the stove. (Word count: 1182)
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » I built a dumb little unblocked game site and I need your ideas